Foursquare announced that it will acquire Placed, the #1 in-store visit attribution across digital, OOH and TV, from Snap Inc. Foursquare will add the Placed product to its bundle of location-based offerings.
Apart from this, Foursquare also announced that it had completed a fundraising round of $150 Million. The round was led by The Raine Group along with their co-investors. This investment will not only fund Placed’s acquisition but will also capitalize on their increased R&D and expansion plans.
This acquisition in the attribution space is a step in Foursquare’s vision to offer a complete toolkit of location-aware services.
The company plans to make Placed Attribution its flagship measurement product, under the “Placed powered by Foursquare” brand.
With access to Foursquare’s core Pilgrim technology and mass of first-party data, Placed will be able to leverage the company’s global map of 105 million POI’s across over 190 countries and can immediately tap into Foursquare’s measured audience in the U.S. of over 100 million monthly devices.
“Consumer, where through our own apps and Foursquare Labs’ R&D efforts we showcase what’s possible and inspire developers via our innovations around the contextual location. We will keep building leadership in all five areas and are well on our way with products in each area today. Our new company will be built on the talents and dedication of more than 350 employees (with over 40% of them in engineering and data science). The fusion of the Foursquare and the Placed teams and cultures will make for a powerful mix.” wrote Jeff Glueck, CEO of Foursquare on the official company blog.
As part of the deal, David Shim – the founder and former CEO of Placed, will be joining the Foursquare executive team as President of the company, bringing all of his tenacity, focus, and passion. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed yet.
Together, Foursquare and Placed will allow a more complete toolkit to be offered to marketers. Foursquare’s Audience Segments will allow marketers to see in Placed dashboards what segments are responding to different ad campaigns, and immediately scale that campaign to millions more similar customers. Not only that, Placed’s over 400 certified publishers can now tap into Foursquare’s Pilgrim SDK, which adds real-time stop-detection to any app where consumers opt-in for location sharing.
